Abstract
The semiconductor manufacturing equipment business is on the verge of dealing with important challenges. The relentless increase in the cost of equipment has led to a situation in which the amortized cost of this equipment over the number of chips produced now rivals the current price of the chips themselves. Many experts are now suggesting -- and only half in jest -- that within a few years, the cost of a fab will equal the GDP of some medium-sized countries. And all of this is occurring at a time when Moores Law is pushing the limits of conventional semiconductor manufacturings lithography technology. Feature sizes are half the dimension of the wavelength that is being used to define the patterns.
To meet these challenges, there are now a growing number of alternatives to conventional lithography that are being developed for making silicon microelectronics. All of them have considerable promise, but they will be expensive to develop and fully commercialize. At the same time, new materials/technology platforms - such as spintronics, plastic electronics, molectronics and nanotube/nanowire electronics are emerging that promise to improve on conventional silicon technology in terms of performance, power consumption and other important metrics. But these raise challenges of their own.
Some observers believe that many current equipment firms will not be able to cope with these issues and will quit the market. As a result, they say, the equipment market will become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few firms. However, at the same time, there have never been so many opportunities for new entrants to stake out an emerging segment of the semiconductor equipment market. This report identifies and quantifies the opportunities in this exciting area, identifies the main players, and analyzes the strategies that will lead equipment companies to success.
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